Agile Methodologies considered religion

Last years I've tried to avoid Agile. Probably those days will be soon gone, since in the company I work for there's a strong commitment to adopt agile methodologies from the near future on.

So I'll have to adapt, I guess. There's no much space for discussion, but I still think Agile success means a failure in software engineering. Sounds dramatic, but I think its popularity has grown exclusively in business-focused software, since it's good to control (not exactly manage) software projects.

The main reason why agile practices are so popular among non-technical people is because it allows the software to follow their short-term criteria. They get the control, and they are no longer required to think deeply into their requirements, since the great news is that they can adapt when they actually see they were wrong. So now we have to deal ourselves with their trial-and-error approaches. This comes with the fact that now we (software engineers) have lost power. Maybe we didn't want it, or didn't use it, but it's gone. We are expected just to follow orders, and at the same time we don't need to think if what we develop will be able to handle probable future requirements. Nobody cares about them anymore.

Summarizing the point, we've lost the most precious area of our profession: modelling the abstractness. And nobody is doing it.

So I received some workshops about Agile. Of course, everything is carefully presented: all keywords are positive, some "benefits" but no "drawbacks" slides, and the annoying fallacy ¹ of trying to prove Agile is correct by exaggerating waterfall possible outcomes.

I tried to find people daring to say they don't like agility, and found one ². However, if you read the comments, youĺl see what I perceived in the workshops: there's no discussion, Agile is good, if it doesn't work for you is your fault.

What kind of approach is that? What is Agile invented for? To exalt the reputation of the Manifesto signers? To build a business on top of that? To write useless³ books? Do we need this? I don't buy it. I don't accept becoming a "believer" of someone else's ideas. Why Agile is not applied to non-business (-focused) software development, such as free software? I was told they're completely different stuff. Sure, but they define what we should consider success, in terms of software.

Probably I'm upset because I'm about to lose what I've fought hard to achieve. Say respect, confidence, long-term results, while keeping the eye on the business. All this, thanks to think abstract, to look further what I was told to do, to care about what I do, and to avoid thinking exclusively if this is taking too long.

From my point of view, we are asked to get rid of the engineering stuff and do only what we're told to do. In practice, this is a list of business-visible features. It's not only that the rest is not important, but the lack of flexibility to non-feature-oriented tasks means they won't be supported in practice. In other words: nobody but us wass doing engineering. Now we have to copy that if we want to be "good enough".